Site Mobile Navigation

FILM; Mickey Rourke Is Sorry. Very, Very, Very Sorry.

CAN I get a little bowl of water?'' Mickey Rourke asks sweetly of the waitress at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, pointing down toward the small dog skittering around between the table legs.

Thick, calloused fingers peel away sunglasses revealing those coal black eyes and that hard-won face; a little puffy here, wrinkled there, flecked with scars, but tanned and genial, still unmistakably that of the star of ''Diner'' and ''Rumble Fish'' two decades ago. ''Dogs are my thing,'' he says as Loki, a Chihuahua terrier mix, leaps into his lap and makes a survey of the tabletop. Mr. Rourke gently cradles her in one arm and offers her some cappuccino foam.

Believe it or not, Mickey Rourke is in the midst of an attempted comeback, this time from a hole so deep that most people had forgotten where he was buried.

He's got a substantial supporting role in one current film (''Spun,'' in which he plays a methamphetamine brewer) and smaller roles in two forthcoming movies (a cowboy-henchman in ''Once Upon a Time in Mexico'' and a futuristic president in ''Masked and Anonymous''). He took the roles for little or no money, hoping it would jog Hollywood's memory and lead to something substantial down the road.

''I hit the wall about five years ago,'' Mr. Rourke says. ''I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, look at what happened to you. I had blown everything, you know? I lost my credibility, my marriage, my money, my soul. I said to myself, you've got to change. And I realized that the acting was the only thing I had left.''

For the first three years, no one wanted to hire him, no one wanted to meet with him. He was living on what he could raise by selling off the last of his movie-star possessions. And then, a couple of years ago, he got a call out of the blue from David Unger, a young and ambitious agent at I.C.M. ''He saved me,'' Mr. Rourke says.

Mr. Rourke -- who claims he's 48, though some sources make him four years older -- says he realizes the days are long gone when studio executives considered him a leading man, critics compared him to James Dean and younger actors sneaked onto the set just to watch him work.

Back when he was still a movie star whose name was above the title and he had a Rolls-Royce, an entourage of yes-men and a big house up in Benedict Canyon, he affected an open hostility to the commercial side of the movie business. He collected enemies casually, and made an ostentatious point of kissing up to no one.

He was just trying to be direct, he says, but he ended up direct-to-video.

As a result, too many people still think of him -- if they think of him at all -- as a cautionary tale, an epic of career wreckage, the Cecil B. DeMille of Hollywood zombies, a damaged survivor of some terrible accident at the intersection of self-loathing and self-regard.

''I burned a lot of bridges, you know?'' Mr. Rourke says. ''People are saying to me now, 'Oh, you're going to have a comeback, you're going to have a comeback.' But it's not that easy for me to have the kind of comeback that someone like John Travolta could have. I spent a lot of years going like this to too many people.''

He juts his middle finger into the air. A few yards behind him, the waitress thinks that perhaps she's being summoned and takes two steps before registering that, no, it's just some dark Mickey moment, and quietly backing away.

''Thank God there's a new generation of directors and studio executives, or I wouldn't stand a chance,'' Mr. Rourke says.

''I just don't want to walk into a restaurant and have people go, 'Oh man, not him.' You know? I used to see that. I'd pop into some places and I'd see the way some of those guys would look at me. A reputation is really hard to live down.''

Mr. Unger says he really didn't know much about Mr. Rourke's troubled history. ''I only knew of the work, and I knew that to a lot of people in the younger generation he was sort of an icon,'' Mr. Unger says. ''I think that, to a lot of them, he's like Marlon Brando was to Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970's.''

So he met Mr. Rourke, and liked what he heard. ''He bared his soul to me,'' Mr. Unger says. ''And he was very realistic, very rational about where he wanted to go. He knew he had a lot to overcome, but, he said, at the same time he knew he was still capable and wanted a shot at proving myself again.''

Philip Andre Rourke Jr. was born in Schenectady, N.Y., but moved to Miami as a boy with his mother, a new stepfather, a brother, a sister and five stepbrothers. He doesn't talk much about those years, but there are hints of violence at home and minor scrapes with the law. At 19, he moved to New York and eventually landed at the Actor's Studio, where he adopted a fierce love of acting and a bit of an attitude. What he didn't land was a job.

''I'd go in and take a meeting and if the guy was looking at me funny, I'd say, 'What are you looking at?,' you know?'' Mr. Rourke says. ''I wasn't about to go in there and kiss somebody's butt and appease them to get a role.''

He moved to the West Coast and got an agent, but more years of low-end jobs passed.

Then, Mr. Rourke says: ''I was bouncing at this transvestite club on Hollywood Boulevard one night when I got a call from my agent and he said, 'Hey, you got a job.' I said, 'What, after eight years?' It was this role in a movie called 'Body Heat,' as a kind of bomb expert who's a friend of the hero.''

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The role was his breakthrough. Soon after, he was a standout in Barry Levinson's ''Diner'' (1982) and overnight became Hollywood's next hot thing, the heir to James Dean, the first button on every agent's speed dial.

At first, even his bad-boy reputation did him no harm. Hollywood has proved itself perfectly willing to put up with the antics of bad boys, so long as their movies make mega-millions. (Did someone say Russell Crowe?) But Mr. Rourke's movies did not make mega-millions. The biggest hit he starred in, Michael Cimino's ''Year of the Dragon,'' made only $18.7 million in 1985.

And as the years passed, he behaved more erratically, battling executives, turning down good roles. ''I turned them down for the silliest reasons,'' Mr. Rourke says. ''I sat across from one director, and I didn't like his coat. And then another time, I didn't like the other lead actor so I turned down what I knew was a great role, and the guy who ended up doing the role got himself an Academy Award.''

He was also surrounding himself with friends from the street, a gaggle of hangers-on including bikers and outright gangsters. What kept Mr. Rourke going through all those years was the lingering heat of his earliest fame and a strange sort of sex appeal. Also, he proved wildly popular abroad, where his greasy, stubble-faced persona struck audiences as the essence of anti-establishment cool.

Back in this country, though, the critics had turned on him. In 1982, the National Society of Film Critics had named him best supporting actor for ''Diner.'' But by 1990, he was winning a Razzie Award as the year's worst actor for his performances in ''The Desperate Hours,'' a disastrous remake of a Bogart classic, and ''Wild Orchid,'' a wretched piece of soft-pornography for which he showed up sporting disfiguring cheek implants.

By 1991, fed up, Mr. Rourke announced he was leaving Hollywood, returning to Miami and trying to get a professional boxing career going. He fought a few bouts and became a figure on the South Beach scene -- where he owned a club called Mickey's -- but he ended up not so much a puncher as a punch line.

A first marriage, to the actress Debra Feuer, had ended in divorce. A second, more tempestuous relationship, with Carré Otis, a former model, resulted in a two-year marriage that ended in 1994.

He was hanging out in Miami with bikers, getting more tattoos, amassing a new entourage of Cuban-American tough guys. He turned up regularly in the tabloid press. One time, he says, he beat up a couple of drug dealers. ''I put one of them in the hospital, and it was in the newspapers,'' Mr. Rourke says. ''I did it in the middle of a public joint. Of course, I lost a studio job the next day.''

For years, almost no one wanted to hire him.

''That's why I'm so indebted to David Unger for taking me on now,'' he says. ''It's better having somebody like him than a lot of gangster yes-men that I had around me before. You know what I mean? A bunch of gold chains agreeing with everything that I said. Because, you know, once the money runs out, that entourage is gone.''

He did a few cheap movies. His mansion was repossessed. One by one he was forced to sell his cars and his motorcycles. The remaining members of his dwindling entourage robbed him blind. ''They took as much stuff as they could carry with them,'' Mr. Rourke says.

So he moved back to Los Angeles. Where else could he go? He lives now in a small place just above the Sunset Strip, sees a therapist, goes to the gym every day, sometimes twice, and spends his evenings at home with his dogs, or wandering down the hill to a grocery store. ''It's not very exciting, which is good for me now,'' he says.

The first project Mr. Unger brought him, ''Spun,'' didn't sit right with Mr. Rourke. ''I didn't like the material and I didn't really like the character,'' he says. ''I told David, I don't want to do this. I also didn't like that they weren't going to pay me any money. I mean, they paid us in green stamps.''

But Mr. Unger was adamant. This was good for Mr. Rourke's career, putting him in touch with one of those younger filmmakers -- in this case, Jonas Akerlund, a Swedish phenom famous for music videos.

''I didn't really know much about what had happened with him in the past,'' Mr. Akerlund says. ''And when I met with him he was very smart and had a great understanding of the character. And there were no problems on the set at all, none. Just the opposite.''

Mr. Rourke also got along well with Robert Rodriguez, director of ''Once Upon a Time in Mexico,'' due out in September. ''I could tell, he was judging me by what he saw,'' Mr. Rourke says. ''That's all I ask, judge me by the man I am now, not by what I was yesterday.''

He slips the sunglasses back over his eyes and calls to Loki, who scampers over a small bush and then seems to fly into his arms, licking wildly at his face.

''It's really hard for me to see down the road,'' Mr. Rourke says. ''I guess I used to be able to look ahead, at one time, but then down-the-road became kind of long and twisting and I got lost somewhere around the bend. I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good.''